Answer: The TCO challenge tool, provided by independent analyst Alinean, Inc., lets you input your IBM mainframe configuration and receive a customized report. It will summarize your three-year total cost of ownership compared with a recommended HP platform. See how you can support the same services, yet reduce operational costs.

At HP Tech Forum 2009, I had the opportunity to meet with HP's Brian Cox and Alvina Nishimoto from the Integrity team. The TCO challenge tool was featured right at the front of the HP area in Tech Forum display area, with huge number savings displaying on the brightest , biggest and boldest screen. With the biggest baddest numbers.

Brian & Alvina also shared a cool, fun quick reference in a spinning wheel with me.

I asked Brian & Alvina what the tool was really about. They replied with it being "an easy to use tool, informative, a great place to start a conversation on what HP can provide for mission-critical servers ". The "numbers in the tool are pre-populated so that you can easily just start playing around with the figures". They also mentioned this tool is great to spark ideas the customers may not have had, cost-savings initiatives and other technology not in place. Gaining knowledge from this tool is good to do before setting up to meet with HP experts, as it can lead you to different choices you may not have thought of before.

HPTF showcased an overwhelming amount of demos, sessons, cool techies stuff everywhere you looked. Twitter crept into the scene this year with ten monitors showcasing all of the tweet buzz. ProLiant was certainly shouted about from every corner. One shout that caught my attention was the ProLiant Collection released 25 platforms in 73 days! I heard one key competitor released 6 in that time frame. ProLiant delivering on all three technology advances: performance, efficiencies, and cost savings - serious improvements in all three areas, each without compromising the other.

Key take-aways on the SL6000

HP’s Doug Tucker walked me through the features of the SL line in easy terms. The SL features front-end cabling and easy serviceability – just pull out the tray. The 2U design supports 2 expansion trays. With the SL,you have a good choice of mix & match configs.

Key take-aways on the DL1000

“Powerful, dense & versatile” – states Christina Tiner from HP. This family delivers improved density, power efficiency & cost. It has similar features of the new SL line. The DL1000 for 10-100 servers, SL for 10000s of servers.

Christina mentions customers are looking to the DL1000 for virtualization deployments in a 2U, as well as for HPC environments. The DL1000 is great for 2 -3 workgroups with little space, for general purpose apps, space saving deployments - good consolidation in a traditional rack mount setting. This family is also more flexible than SL – IO expansion, 3PCI slots, graphics controllers.

Lots of activity this week at HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas - and not just in the casinos! The announcement of the new Extreme Scale Out (ExSO) systems (SL160z G6, SL170z G6, SL2x170z G6, along with their cousin the DL1000 G6) appears to be a huge hit. The folks showing this in the HP booth have been busy non-stop demonstrating it to customers. Being a virtualization guy, I asked about where these servers fit into the virtualization landscape. Although it may be a bit early to tell definitively, the most likely usage would be in some sort of cloud computing infrastructure. Certainly these "skinless" high density, high performance systems should be popular with the High Performance Computing (HPC) crowd, but that type of use is usually not geared towards virtualization.

The ExSO servers are certified for use with Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere, so the foundation is there to be used in a virtual cloud infrastructure. The flexibility of the configurations for maximum memory, maximum storage, or maximum CPU density should satisfy the needs of cloud customers. I'm looking forward to see how these servers play out with virtualization in the extreme scale out world, but one thing I know is that they're sure to be a hit.

I'd love to hear what you think about cloud computing and virtualization. Where does virtualization fit in the cloud (which, of course depends on how you define "cloud"). Pros/cons/benefits/issues? Or is my head virtually in the clouds :-)

This is my last full day at Tech Forum 2009 and I elected to split the day in half and send the morning in further breakout sessions and the afternoon on the exhibit floor. Energy was still high when I looked around attendees that were having breakfast, although starting the sessions at 8.00 am in Vegas was probably pushing it for some. Okay, off to the breakout sessions.

The first one I attended was HP Commercial Notebook overview hosted by Brian Allen HP (Product Manager)Luggables to laptops to Notebooks have been with us for many years and have now become such a commodity I am not sure what we would do without them. I really enjoy my new iPhone but have still to master the tiny keyboard. What Brian updated us on today was the latest trends HP is building into it's commercial notebooks.

HP notebooks are starting to offer Quad core chipsets into their mobile workstations

The new Dream Color monitors, developed in association with DreamWorks. These displays have a highly accurate color engine that displays up to 15 million color – this is a amazing display on a notebook

QuickLook2 feature allows a user instant (10 seconds) access to a cached version of Outlook without having to book the machine

Session 2 was Six Core AMD Opteron processor hosted by Travis Justilian of AMDTravis walked us though AMD’s new chip offering (Istanbul) that released in early June and you can see them being offered in the new G6 HP ProLiant servers. The Istanbul chip sets have embedded Hyper Transport technology (HT) which improves processor through put. Travis’ analogy of HT was “it’s like handing the processor with a pair of tweezers so it can pluck out the exact data to process”

AMD-P suite has AMD Power Cap technology and AMD Cool Core which allows certain parts of the chip to be cooled

AMD has made a 14x performance gain from first chip in 2003 to where they are now with Opteron in 2009.

My last session of the morning was HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure Maturity model hosted by Russ WagnerThis was a really interesting session, but one that many people appeared to have missed. I liken AI being put in place to battle urban sprawl and trying to replace it with a Master Planned community. Datacenters rarely have the luxury of being build from scratch and as they grow as does the complexity of how they need to be managed. Urban sprawl is probably not the best term, but I think it illustrates the point. The value of Adaptive Infrastructure is to drive consistent building blocks across business enterprises to make them easier to manage and maintain.

Okay back to the session with Russ. AIMM (Adaptive Infrastructure Maturity Model) helps determine opportunities to decrease your IT costs while decreasing your IT costs while increasing overall data center efficiency. It is a well established process for working through a structured path to identify real value and opportunity. These workshops working with teams like Russ, take about 4 hours going through a 50 questions questionnaire. It’s worth taking a look to understand Adaptive Infrastructure better as I really think it is one of HP's best kept secrets.

As I mentioned earlier, I elected to spend the afternoon on the show floor, which for me was having the ability of discussing many of the topics I had heard about in the earlier breakout session and in the keynotes. It’s interesting to hear about new technology in a presentation, but even more interesting to see it in action. I had a chance to go back and visit Brian Allen and actually see the mobile workstation Dream Color display that was shows 15 million colors. Clearly worth a see (no pun intended). Also, something I had not mentioned earlier where the large format printer that HP also had on the floor. All very impressive. I got a chance to see the see the new ProLiant G6 product line, as well and the recently launched SL 6000 extreme scale out server.

The afternoon turned out to be a little mind numbing and could have used more time, but I really enjoyed myself.

Delisa Johnson currently leads successful, corporate events for HP Servers and is established as the go-to person for business unit communications regarding launches, executive meetings, wins and business updates.

I am a member of the Enterprise Group Global Marketing team blogging on topics of interest for HP Servers. Check out blog posts on all four Server blog sites-Reality Check, The Eye on Blades, Mission Critical Computing and Hyperscale Computing- for exciting news on the future of compute.

Luke Oda is a member of the HP's BCS Marketing team. With a primary focus on marketing programs that support HP's BCS portfolio. His interests include all things mission-critical and the continuing innovation that HP demonstrates across the globe.

I work in the HP Servers marketing group, managing a marketing team responsible for marketing solutions for enterprise customers who run mission-critical workloads and depend on HP to keep their business continuously running.